nessed things more horrible than
I had dreamed.

Sitting down, I tried to conjecture as nearly as sanity would let me
just what had happened, and how I might end the horror, if indeed it had
been real. Matter it seemed not to be, nor ether, nor anything else
conceivable by mortal mind. What, then, but some exotic _emanation_;
some vampirish vapor such as Exeter rustics tell of as lurking over
certain churchyards? This I felt was the clue, and again I looked at the
floor before the fireplace where the mold and niter had taken strange
forms.

In ten minutes my mind was made up, and taking my hat I set out for
home, where I bathed, ate, and gave by telephone an order for a pickax,
a spade, a military gas-mask, and six carboys of sulfuric acid, all to
be delivered the next morning at the cellar door of the shunned house in
Benefit Street. After that I tried to sleep; and failing, passed the
hours in reading and in the composition of inane verses to counteract my
mood.

At eleven a. m. the next day I commenced digging. It was sunny weather,
and I was glad of that. I was still alone, for as much as I feared the
unknown horror I sought, there was more fear in the thought of telling
anybody. Later I told Harris only through sheer necessity, and because
he had heard odd tales from old people which disposed him ever so little
toward belief. As I turned up the stinking black earth in front of the
fireplace, my spade causing a viscous yellow ichor to ooze from the
white fungi which it severed, I trembled at the dubious thoughts of what
I might uncover. Some secrets of inner earth are not good for mankind,
and this seemed to me one of them.

My hand shook perceptibly, but still I delved; after a while standing in
the large hole I had made. With the deepening of the hole, which was
about six feet square, the evil smell increased; and I lost all doubt of
my imminent contact with the hellish thing whose emanations had cursed
the house for over a century and a half. I wondered what it would look
like--what its form and substance would be, and how big it might have
waxed through long ages of life-sucking. At length I climbed out of the
hole and dispersed the heaped-up dirt, then arranging the great carboys
of acid around and near two sides, so that when necessary I might empty
them all down the aperture in quick succession. After that I dumped
earth only along the other two sides; working more slowly and donning my
gas-mask as the s